Society

Thursday

James Innes-Smith

Lateral thinking: the beauty of bungalows

We keep hearing about the importance of levelling up. Architects tasked with the responsibility of building new homes, however, might want to consider levelling across. With land prices at a premium, bungalows may not appear to be the most prudent use of limited space but lateral living has plenty to recommend it. Originally built for early European settlers in India, the first UK bungalows — from the Hindi word bangla, meaning ‘belonging to Bengal’ — appeared in Westgate on the north coast of Kent in 1869. These early examples tended to be austere holiday homes constructed from prefabricated corrugated iron. Over in the US, grander structures became increasingly popular with

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why stamp duty doesn’t add up

‘Blame it all on business’ was the Tory strategists’ answer to petrol queues and the risk of a no-turkey Christmas that threatened to distract the party-conference faithful from adulation of the Prime Minister. As spin, it might have been shocking if it wasn’t so familiar. But as an explanation of the supply crisis, the idea that business has been deaf to years of warnings that it could no longer rely on immigrant labour is hogwash, rivalled only by the proposition that spiralling wages will lead us to a fairer society — rather than contributing to a bout of uncontrolled inflation in which higher pay actually buys fewer goods because all

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Blame it all on the middle-class drug users

We can suffer a lethal pandemic with lockdowns, petrol shortages and supermarket shelves almost entirely denuded of sausages. But when Facebook and its various ahellspawn offspring go down for seven hours, the country is sent into a tailspin of misery and confusion. On Monday, Facebook users could be seen out on the streets of our towns and cities accosting strangers and explaining to them exactly what they had for supper the night before, or showing photographs of themselves with a couple of friends enjoying a night out in a pub in Ruabon. All they wanted, these people, was a thumbs up from those strangers, or a warm hug or a

Leroy Logan

Why Cressida Dick must go

After the murder of Sarah Everard by Wayne Couzens, I have come to the conclusion that Cressida Dick needs to go. Yes, it’s easy to call for the resignation of a Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Things go wrong in the policing of London and when the mistakes are big enough, there will be calls for heads to roll. Often, such calls are just another way of expressing anger. But not only has Cressida Dick failed to produce tangible improvements over the past four years: under her tenure, things have become significantly worse. I was a police officer for 30 years and I’m afraid there is much truth in what critics of

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Why I retrained as a butcher

Two years ago, I enrolled on a butchery course. I rather fancied seeing how the sausage was made, and also envisaged taking home handsome pork chops and having an ‘in’ when I needed to order my Christmas turkey. But the amateur course was no longer offered by my local college. So instead of a four-week, two-hour evening course, I signed up for a year-long Level 2 NVQ in craft butchery that involved a lot more anatomical theory and hairnets than I had anticipated. Butchery work is physically demanding — I wasn’t made for carrying beef forequarters over my shoulder — and comes with the usual risks of a job involving

Peter Jones

What James Bond and Aristophanes have in common

So James Bond is back, doing exactly what he always does, inviting the audience into a fantasy world for the pleasure of wondering ‘What if?’ In this respect, Bond films resemble the work of the world’s first recorded comic poet, the Athenian Aristophanes (c. 440-380 bc). His premise was that Athens’s problems could be solved only by little people of no importance, not the greedy, vain and incompetent leaders in the public eye. So the scene was set for the hero(ine) to put them firmly in their place. One favourite subject for his comic fantasies was the long war between Athens and Sparta (431-404 bc). Take three examples. In 421

The Spectator

Letters: In defence of Land Rovers

How to stay safe Sir: Mary Wakefield is correct to highlight the opprobrium heaped on anyone who suggests sensible safety advice to women (‘Don’t mix up murder and hate crime’, 2 October). It has long been the case that this is the one area where it is impossible to give crime prevention information without stirring up a hornet’s nest. Motorists are constantly told not to leave valuables on display when they park their cars, as they may return to find their windows broken and the articles stolen. No one claims that motorists are being ‘victim shamed’ when given this advice, even though the police may well roll their eyes when

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Facebook’s blackout, California’s oil spill and Rishi’s kitchen sink

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said he did not think Britain was in a crisis; he wanted it to move towards ‘a high-wage, high-skill, high-productivity economy’ that was not addicted to cheap foreign labour. Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the Conservative party conference in Manchester that he had committed £500 million to renew job-support schemes, now that furlough and the £20 a week universal credit bonus had ended. Of the unemployed, he told Sky News: ‘We are throwing literally the kitchen sink at helping them.’ A group of people in the street shouted ‘Tory scum’ at Sir Iain Duncan Smith and hit him with a traffic

Toby Young Toby Young

Who let the dog out?

Caroline and I are just back from a weekend break in Scotland and, nice though it was, I hadn’t realised how difficult travelling anywhere is at the moment. We had originally planned to drive, but the fuel crisis put paid to that, so we had to book a last-minute flight. EasyJet from Luton to Edinburgh was £475.92 for the two of us — ye gods! — and three days in the mid-stay car park was a whopping £128. To cap it all, the bus that takes you from the car park to the airport wasn’t running — Covid, obviously — so we had to walk about half a mile carrying

Ananyo Bhattacharya

The forgotten Einstein: how John von Neumann shaped the modern world

More than anyone else, John von Neumann created the future. He was an unparalleled genius, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, and he helped invent the world as we now know it. He came up with a blueprint of the modern computer and sparked the beginnings of artificial intelligence. He worked on the atom bomb and led the team that produced the first computerised weather forecast. In the mid-1950s, he proposed the idea that the Earth was warming as a consequence of humans burning coal and oil, and warned that ‘extensive human intervention’ could wreak havoc with the world’s climate. Colleagues who knew both von Neumann and

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The case for dodging cracks in the pavement

It is interesting to consider what would have happened if the Covid virus had emerged in 1921. Or 1821. Or 1521. There would have been no vaccine, for one thing. Treatment would mostly have been worse. In the 17th century we would have blamed the entire thing on Catholics. But in a few respects, bizarrely, we might have done better. For instance, miasma theory, although technically wrong, might have protected us better against airborne transmission than the early scientific consensus that the disease was spread via droplets on surfaces. A believer in miasma theory might have practised mask wearing (ideally with a large beak), indoor ventilation and outdoor gathering more

Matt Ridley

China is using the climate as a bargaining chip

China’s President Xi Jinping has apparently not yet decided whether to travel to Glasgow next month for the big climate conference known as COP26. That is no doubt partly because he’s heard about the weather in Glasgow in November, and partly because he knows the whole thing will be a waste of his time. After all, the fact that it is the 26th such meeting and none of the previous 25 solved the problem they set out to solve suggests the odds are that the event will be the flop on the Clyde. But another reason he is hesitating was stated pretty explicitly by his Foreign Minister, Wang Yi: ‘Climate

Seb Kennedy

Power grab: who’s hoarding all the gas?

Before Britain started worrying about a shortage of lorry drivers and petrol, we were fretting about a spike in wholesale gas prices. A couple of weeks and news cycles later, it would be easy to imagine that crisis had gone away. It hasn’t. On the contrary, global gas markets are preparing for a volatile winter. Britain, along with the rest of Europe, will face the full force of the crisis, raising the prospect of factory closures, if not general power cuts. Like Covid, the energy crisis came from China but has spread worldwide. Last week, Xi Jinping’s government raised the stakes by ordering its state-owned energy companies to secure winter

Bruce Anderson

Is this Greece’s finest wine since Homer strummed his lyre?

We were in deepest Dorset, l’Angleterre profonde. The weather was also typically English: inundations followed by counter-attacks from the Indian summer. Despite those, and even under a still blue sky, it was just too nippy to eat outside — or at least, that was what the less well-insulated members of the party insisted. Fear no more the heat of the sun. It has gone south with the swallows. But there was mellow fruitfulness, in this season which offers a delicious choice between grouse and partridge (unless you are Nicholas Soames, and have both). When it came to accompanying bottles, we were eclectic. Our hosts are good friends of Giugi, Marchese

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Should I pay to charge my electric car at a friend’s house?

Q. An acquaintance suggested organising a celebratory dinner in honour of some mutual friends. He asked my husband and me, along with the other proposed guests, if we would all contribute towards the cost. The evening, in the private room of a top London restaurant, was a huge success and, as agreed, the organiser paid the bill and later sent us all emails with his bank account details to reimburse him. We have now heard that the friends in whose honour the dinner was held are under the impression that the party was paid for solely by the organiser and have been singing his praises ever since. I am not

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

We should never have been in Afghanistan

Two important studies have been published this autumn on the apparent failure of our almost 20-year war in Afghanistan. In the Times Literary Supplement my friend Rory Stewart has been reviewing The Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock; and last week I went along to the launch at the Frontline Club in Paddington of the BBC correspondent David Loyn’s The Long War, my copy of which has just arrived. Both look like brilliant accounts of what went wrong, both will surely prove useful guides to a lamentable episode in modern statecraft, but both — and Rory too in his own TLS assessment and recommendations — appear to me to be missing

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Has Covid killed criticism?

The pandemic was bad for criticism with its universal dogma of ‘kindness’. Restaurant, theatre, film and book critics felt compelled to be kind, as if criticism itself was coughing at a death bed. But who does this kindness benefit? Last year I reviewed Michael Rosen’s book about his Covid-19-related coma: Many Different Kinds of Love. I liked it, but I suggested that publishing the notes people had written to him as he lay in the coma was a waste of both their time and ours. Rosen didn’t like this and moaned on Twitter: ‘I think they are the power and the beauty of the ordinary. And how extraordinary that this

Matthew Lynn

Factories close, offices shut: what happens if the UK runs out of gas

The stove won’t light. The boiler won’t fire up. Pipes are frozen and the water has stopped running. Welcome to Christmas 2021. Amid a fierce cold snap, with another ‘Beast from the East’ blasting across the country, the UK’s meagre stockpiles of gas have been exhausted and the country is plunged into a crisis. Old people are dying and the rest of us are doing our best to keep warm. The closest thing to the apocalypse most of us will experience in our lifetimes has arrived. Well, perhaps. It is easy to sketch out lurid scenarios of what might happen if the country runs out of gas. In reality, it

Andrew Marr

The true enemy of political interviews

The rhythm of the big party conference leader interviews is a strange one. First come days of slow, repetitive, detailed preparation, much of which we know will be junked on the day. My brilliant team play Keir Starmer or Boris Johnson, being as cheerily obstructive, long-winded and deflecting as possible, until all of us could repeat the key facts and graphs and quotes in our sleep. Next, a frantic early Sunday morning (up well before five) to fillet the latest news, discarding what had been favourite questions and lines of attack, and boil everything down to a manageable size. By now my heart rate is rising and I’m eating more